…both literally, and figuratively, according to my late Grandmother, who was something of an “expert” on the English monarchies. So rotten, that when a group of men carried his dead body out, three died from the smell alone.

As a long-standing legend, this is delightful – the stuff that fishwives tales are made of. How fitting that this murderous megalomaniac, this bloated, syphlitic adulterer, none too clean to start with (this was in the days when the ostensibly “clean” people took baths once a month) should end up in such a state.